All time guide for Building a world-class Website

The first step to creating a strong website is finding a good domain name on the internet, (a.k.a your web url address, like www.michaelibeh.net ).
You can use websites like GoDaddy.com or Namecheap.com etc to search for and register available domain name you want to use. Don’t forget to renew your domain name payment annually to avoid losing it.

You can use a Top Level Domain (TDL) extensions as per your choice. Like .com or .net or .org or .edu extension depending on the type of business you operate. For instance, an educational website or school should use the .edu extension while registering the domain name on the internet and organizations should use .org, businesses and companies can use .com or .net extensions, exclusively for the audience to easily remember or locate them on the internet.

The Hosting phase

After Registering your preferred domain name on the internet, now you can buy a hosting package for your website. A hosting plan is a purchase of server space where you can store all your website contents, files, videos, audios, images and more. Think of hosting plan like buying a physical flash drive or hard disk drive you use to store your files locally on your devices or computer…Got it? Okay!

Most of the times, you can buy a hosting package from the same platform (website) you registered your domain name or you might choose to use a different platform for your hosting and point your domain name to your preferred hosting platform.

There are 3 main types of web hosting: shared hosting, virtual private server (VPS) hosting, and dedicated hosting. The one you choose will depend on how much traffic you anticipate and how much data you’ll need to store.

• Shared hosting

This is when your site’s information is stored on a server that also houses other sites’ information.
Shared hosting can be the most economical type of web hosting and is ideal for small business websites that don’t have special technical needs.
The downside to shared hosting is that your site could be slowed if one of the sites you share server space with experiences heavy traffic.

• VPS hosting

This type of hosting can offer more power than shared hosting. You still share server space with other sites, but you don’t have to split resources like storage and memory. This means your site can handle higher traffic levels.

• Dedicated hosting:

This is where you don’t share server space with anyone else, it can be the most expensive and most reliable option. It makes sense for sites that handle a lot of traffic or need special features and extra data security.

Tip
No matter which type of hosting and which provider you pick, check if they offer any special capabilities and support that your website might need.
24/7 customer support can be a valuable feature. If you experience problems, you’ll want to be able to contact your hosting provider immediately.

You should also check a host’s uptime, or the percentage of time websites run without interruption. Use a service like MyHostingUptime to check the uptime rates of potential hosts. Uptime rates should be 99.999% or higher.

Set up a custom email address on your domain, like [email protected] This will make your business look professional, and can help increase brand awareness among the people you an email. You can get this set up within your Website control panel after you must have bought your hosting package. After these first 3 priority steps. You can now start with the designing and development of your website.

• Note: Either you’re creating your website using Content Management System (CMS) like WordPress, Wix, Joomla, etc or you’re writing your website codes from scratch, Domain name registration and buying a hosting package are compulsory.

Your website should satisfy your customers’ needs, while helping reach your business goals like raising awareness, driving sales, or collecting leads, simultaneously.

To raise awareness, start with the basics: business name, map location, and contact details. Consider putting your contact details in the footer of every page and encourage customers to email or call if they have questions.

Have an “about us” section explaining what your business does and stands for. Link to your business’ social media accounts, and have staff bios and customer reviews to help visitors get to know you.

To make contacting your business easy, and to help you to stay in touch with customers, create a form on your “contact us” page, where they can input their details. Don’t ask for too much information, or they might not fill it out.

Search engines pull words from your webpages to understand what the website is all about, so it’s important that the website’s content is descriptive.

To make sure your website covers all the relevant information, use the 5 W’s:

• who (Michael’s Workspace),
• what (World class website developer),
• when (available as freelance daily),
• where (91 RD Festac phase2 Lagos state Nigeria.), and
• why (Topnotch Digital Freelancing, Professional training, and consultation).

If you think it would be helpful to explain your product or service in more detail, create a frequently asked questions (FAQ) section to allow customers to learn more about your company. Like we do on our “Faq page” make it a link.

Very importantly, make sure to use font sizes, colors, designs and other aspects of design consistently across your website to make it look presentable and professional.

Next, include features that are unique to your business. And also use a premium software plugins to enhance the functionality of your website. If you plan to carry out credit card transactions on your website, make sure that there’s a top-notch digital security against hackers. This will increase your reputation and trust from your customers to keep patronizing and referring your to more customers as well.